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SBU journalism professor pens first novel with encouragement of peer and former students

Mar 26, 2014 |

Dr. Denny Wilkins’ first novel is a love story in more ways than one.

Without the supportive embrace of a respected peer and two former students, “mapping Utah” still would be just a Word file on his computer, said Wilkins, now in his 18th year as a professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure University.

Wilkins will talk about “mapping Utah” at the Olean Public Library at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 9.

Longtime English professor Rick Simpson gushed about Wilkins’ manuscript when he read it several years ago, but it wasn’t until Kelly Zientek, ’05, prodded her former prof that he took the plunge to get the book published.

Wilkins had sent the manuscript to Zientek to read in 2011, but it wasn’t until early last semester — when asked by Wilkins to look at 70,000 words of another book he was working on — that the topic of his first book surfaced again.

“She sent me back her comments on the new book and said, ‘Whatever happened to ‘mapping Utah’?” Wilkins said. “A few days later, she called me and asked if she could try to publish it. She thought I might be angry, but I was never more honored and flattered in my life. This thing would still be sitting on my hard drive if Kelly hadn’t pushed it.”

Zientek had no experience in the publishing world, but was so impressed with “mapping Utah” that she was willing to figure it out in order to get Wilkins’ work in people’s hands.

“I just felt like he was this really accomplished person and feared that I might be overstepping my bounds, but he was really receptive to the idea,” said Zientek, an adjunct ESL instructor at UNC-Charlotte. “I just started Googling, and actually found some e-books on publishing e-books to help me figure this out.”

Zientek enlisted friend and former college roommate Holly McIntyre Hartigan, ’05, to design the book’s cover. The gesture was especially meaningful to Wilkins; Holly was dating senior Shane Colligan in the spring of 2003 when Colligan died, nine years to the day after receiving his first of two heart transplants.

“Holly and Shane’s roommates came to me the Monday after he died,” recalled Wilkins, a respected teacher but notoriously tough grader. “Shane had left an email posted on his dorm room door with a compliment from me of maybe six words and he had written on it in big red letters, ‘Yowza!’ They just thought Shane would have liked me to have it, so having Holly involved in my book is very special.”

Zientek formatted Wilkins’ novel to be published as an e-book for Kindle, Nook and Smashwords, and as a print-on-demand paperback she created through Createspace.com; it’s available with the e-books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

“What e-publishing and print-on-demand have done is give authors a lot more power over their work,” she said. “And in the past, where you might get only a few weeks on a store shelf to turn a profit before it gets pulled, being available as an e-book gives a book a chance to grow organically and slowly as people discover it.”

Wilkins meticulously details the fitful journey to publication at mappingutah.com, but in a nutshell:

In 1989, the love of Wilkins’ life rejected his matrimonial request, he emptied two six-packs, wrote 30 pages he only vaguely recalls writing, threw the floppy disk in a box, found it five years later, decided adding to the story was better than working on his doctoral dissertation, forgot about it again, discovered it four years later, fleshed out the characters some more, sent sample chapters to 70 literary agents, got feedback from one who said it was wordy, whacked 48,000 words (one at a time), and then let it “gather digital dust” for another six years.

Enter Dr. Simpson. Over breakfast while discussing another friend’s attempt at a novel, Wilkins cracked to Simpson, “I’m sure glad I didn’t let you read mine.”

Unaware Wilkins had written a book, Simpson pestered him for months until Wilkins finally let him read it. A month later, Simpson emailed him:

“The characters are marvelous. You attempt one of the most difficult feats of all for the male novelist, screenwriter, dramatist, or poet, namely the portrayal from the inside of a complex, flawed, mature, maturing woman. … The portrayals of both (main characters) are striking and memorable. And many fine minor characters show up. … I found myself caring about these people quickly and deeply. I turned pages rapidly. I thought about the story when I wasn’t reading. I wanted to get back to the book when I was elsewhere.”

Flattered to the brink of tears, Wilkins still left the manuscript in dry dock for five more years until he let Zientek read it. She did more than get it published.

“Kelly is really the person who made it better,” Wilkins said. “She did a conceptual edit, and then a line edit. She found things as a woman that as a guy I didn’t see. And she was incredibly professional about it. She didn’t make changes, she just pointed out the problems and let me make the decisions.”

The editing process was payback for a professor’s passionate devotion to detail, Zientek said.

“Denny drilled a couple of things into our heads as J-students: don’t be redundant; and show, don’t tell,” she said. “So I had to laugh out loud a few times when I would make comments on the manuscript to ask him to show, not just tell.”

Subtitled “love and war in the wilderness,” Wilkins’ “mapping Utah” is about a 30-year-old woman named Kara who flees a stifling job and relationship in Seattle and follows the prompting of a mysterious map into the majesty of Utah.

There, she encounters Noah, a licensed pilot who adores his hermitic existence in Greasewood Draw, where he battles the destruction of delicate wildlife areas by dropping paint bombs from an ultralight plane onto off-road vehicles.

Jack Nash hauls in a fortune for his environmentally immoral ORV expeditions and wants Noah dead. All three lives collide under the staggering beauty of the desert landscape, where passion and grit battles greed and power, and only one side will survive.

Wilkins drew upon his degrees in geology, environmental studies, and communication to write “mapping Utah.”

“It taught me something that I try to teach my students,” he said. “I think this novel isn’t so much a masterpiece of creativity as it is a demonstration of management of material. I touch everything: geology, geography, biology, botany, chemistry, even some philosophy.”

His collegiate experience in the Northwest (Evergreen State) and the Rockies (University of Colorado) lends the book a heaping dose of authenticity.

“I know the route Kara took from Seattle to Green River (Utah) like the back of my hand,” Wilkins said. “Between 1994 and 1998, I drove it four times with a mini-cassette recorder in my hand. I recorded nearly 1,500 observations about what I saw … and what Kara might have seen, experienced, and thought. So many details in this novel stem from that 4,000 miles of driving and paying attention.”

Wilkins admits holding a book he has written is “kind of a kick,” but the story of how the book ultimately came to be is equally gratifying.

“That’s what tastes the sweetest,” he said, “having worked with these two kids to get it done.”